


burn your fire for no witness

by foxbones



Series: yr fave is femslash [1]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/F, I-M-A-G-I-N-E, everyone is a girl and everything hurts, gale is a girl, katniss is olive-skinned in canon and come on people, peeta is a girl, reupload, that thing where i do a genderswap so yr fave is femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-08
Updated: 2017-06-08
Packaged: 2018-11-10 14:57:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11129157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxbones/pseuds/foxbones
Summary: "Gale is mine and I am hers. Anything else is unthinkable."AU: Girls are the only one reaped for the Hunger Games, girls are the only ones who pay the bloody price for a revolution they can't remember.





	burn your fire for no witness

**Author's Note:**

> a reupload of my first foray into the "yr fave is femslash" series where i genderbend one or both members of a pairing to make it femslash. because femslash is literally better than any other type of pairing, please and thank you.
> 
> (title from angel olsen's "white fire")

fierce and light and young  
hit the ground and run

-angel olsen, "white fire"

 

i dreamt you found me out in a field  
you tripped over my site  
and you dug me out of a shallow grave  
with your swiss army knife  
and only you could revive me  
so badly decomposed  
i was bone-white, dry and scaly  
but you still took me home  
dreaming every night of you  
shaking at the sight of you

-timber timbre, "lay down in tall grass"

 

 

 

 

In the center of town, there is a statue of a woman.

The woman is on her knees, her hands clasped at her bared breast. Her face, corroded green over the years of weather and conflict and local boys’ piss, is pulled into an expression of pain and desperation. She looks as though she is begging for forgiveness.

We know that she was placed there as a reminder of the Dark Days. She is meant to represent the reason for the Games, the reason we wear dread like a winter jacket, too tight around the neck.

In the Capitol, they have old books that say, “If not for Eve, there would be no Reaping.” And so the statue is named Eve.

But we do not know who Eve is, or else we do not remember.

 

 

 

 

It was a woman who started the revolution. That we do know, and will never be allowed to forget.

It is the girls who must gather in the center of town, it is the girls whose mothers sew charms of safety and luck into their dresses. Some have strings tied to their finger, and the strings stretch across the square, tied to the wrist of their best friend, their younger sister. _You go, and I go, too._ Promises made by candlelight as little girls, pins stuck in fingertips and pressed into each other’s palms. Boys run free, loud and careless until the mines close their eyes, but even the smallest girls walk in tight groups, speak in secret languages of joined pinkies and quick smiles. They use chalk on the dark wood of the floor they share with their sisters, keep track of their monthly blood, count down the days until the Reaping. Blood is blood is blood.

“Safe and sound,” the mothers sing to baby girls, and only baby girls. “Forever we’ll keep ye safe and sound.” Baby girls are not rocked in the cradle, though boys are rocked heartily and often. It is bad luck to rock a baby girl, or her name will come tumbling from the Reaping jar some day.

Town mothers braid white ribbons into their daughter’s hair, special plaits for protection. They save up for floss that gets tied into bracelets, green for fortune, blue for longevity. Pink for innocence. Red for vivacity. Little girls kneel in the sand of the old quarry, trade bracelets with friends, unaware they are exchanging longevity for innocence.

The birth of a son is a celebration. Fathers give their names over like prizes, drink corn batch with the other men and get hearty pats on the back. Mothers weep and smile, kiss the cheeks of their baby boys that will stay, that will not be taken, that may live longer yet. There is a demand for miracles that might quicken a boy in the womb, backwoods potions and the old wives’ advice to light matches over the belly, to walk three times around a blind goat. Women drink mixtures that taste like tar and smoke, bleed out in their own beds. It was a girl, their husbands swear, it must have been a girl who poisoned her from the inside.

Daughters come into the world, and it is a sentence. “If not for Eve,” we say, though we do not always know the rest.

We give our daughters to the Hunger Games and pray their deaths are quick and easy, that their short time was sweet as it could have been.

 

 

 

 

 

I.

 

 

 

 

 

Gale is tall, wide shoulders and narrow hips. When she naps in the treetops, her body unfurls and reveals its hidden angles, the bends of knees and sturdy elbows. Katniss watches, contemplates waking her with a rock to the boot. Even if taken by surprise, there’s no doubt that Gale would land on her feet, ready.

They’ve done this for so long that there are moments in the woods when Katniss cannot imagine these trees without Gale’s hand touching them in passing, cannot fathom the stream without Gale’s crossing. Together, they’ve bent to the hills like branches. Gale drops her pack into the grass, straw between her teeth. Katniss sits down beside her, peels an apple with her hunting knife, hums an old song her mother used to sing. This is yesterday, or last month, or every day they’ve ever known and will know.

“You can’t hold a tune to save your life, Catnip.”

“And you’re a real singer. Sold out performances in the Capitol, right?”

Gale belts out of tune, gives Katniss a wide grin.

“That's right. They love my voice out west. Can’t get enough of me.”

Katniss tosses the peel into Gale’s lap. “That’s yours, then. I’m throwing a rose on your stage.”

Gale nods with exaggeration, puts on a Capitol accent. “Thank you, darling audience. I’ll be here all week.”

Sometimes Gale will fold the apple peel into a speckled red blossom. Sometimes they’ll walk back up into the woods and hang it from a treebranch, knowing it’ll be eaten within the hour. Sometimes Katniss saves the peel in her pocket, finds it days later, brown and shriveled like a heart left out in the sun.

They could lie in this field forever, just as they have since they were girls. _Gale is mine, and I am hers._ If Katniss should rest her head on Gale’s shoulder, it will be just another step in the quiet rhythm they’ve always danced. If Gale sometimes shoots straighter when Katniss is watching, if Katniss sleeps best when her back is against Gale’s, propped up in a tree and spines aligned, it is nothing.

It is everything.

 

 

 

 

“I wish this was it,” Gale will say, on a day when the sky is clouded over with incoming snow. “I wish it was just us and the woods, and nothing else out there.”

Katniss is watching Gale’s breath curl around her high cheekbones, her long nose and dark eyes. Gale cut her black hair short when they turned twelve, was determined to be as fast and strong and wanted as her brothers. Now her hair might fall across her brow, and she’ll push it out of the way in a boyish gesture, return the smile of a passing girl in a way that makes the girl’s mother blush and her father blanch. Not that it means much, coming from Gale. Gale prefers the woods to anywhere else, makes no apologies for preferring Katniss’ company to all the girls who might smile and call her name.

Gale’s wearing a scarf that Prim knit for her last fall. Prim likes Gale’s steady nature, the way even her laughter is calm and easy. Katniss knows the close smell of that scarf. Under it is a white scar from a fall when they were young, and the stark lines of muscles in Gale’s neck. Lines that Katniss knows because she’s seen them stretch to follow the flight of a sparrow, seen Gale’s back ripple when they swam in the river, half-undressed and grinning when they hit the water. Gale’s body is a map Katniss could use to find her way back, she thinks.

 

 

 

 

Some girls are quick to find love, or at least limbs that will bend around their own. They encourage each other to unwind the potential of their bodies before it’s too late; unspoken is the expectation that they’ll be young when they lay with someone for the first time, because already they are too old, because they grow up fast and hard and with a heaviness to their shoulders.

The boy in town stares at Katniss for too long, smiles from under a mop of reddish brown hair, constellations of freckles. He isn’t handsome, but his hands look soft and his shirt is clean and white. Katniss flushes red and drops her head, avoids his gaze. Gale looks on, frowning.

Later, they are in the woods. They are sitting on their rock, waiting for the sun to go down.

“That boy likes you,” Gale says, peeling young sticks for the fire. “You could go with him, if you wanted.”

“Go where?”

Gale snaps the stick in half, throws it off into the brush. “You know, Catnip.”

Katniss shakes her head. “I wouldn’t,” she says roughly, with heat in her throat. “I was just surprised. I didn’t think anyone thought of me that way.”

There’s a moment where they are quiet, and Gale is sitting so still that Katniss thinks she might be holding her breath. Gale’s looking off at something in the woods.

“Of course they do,” she says, and shakes her head. “How could they not, Catnip?”

 

 

 

 

Katniss’ mother had wanted boys. At least one, she’d said. It would have been nice, she’d said, to have at least one they couldn’t take from me. And so there were the times when she turned away from Katniss, when she ignored Prim’s tears, times when Katniss’ father would have been the one to give her a warm smile, to carry Prim off to bed.

Gale has brothers. There could have been animosity there, jealousy, but there was none. Gale learned to run faster than them, climb higher and jump farther and lead them. Everyone has said it since she was young: Gale is a natural leader. Not that anyone expects a woman to lead anything, not anymore.

Gale’s hair is short. Katniss’ braid grows longer.

 

 

 

 

And it was Katniss who cut Gale’s hair the first time. A pair of shears in the woods, Gale sitting on a stump, Katniss standing behind her.

“Do it,” Gale had said when Katniss hesitated, gave her a look. “What’re you scared for? I’m the one who should be scared. You’re holding the sharp things, and I’m looking the other way.”

Katniss breathed in through her mouth. “I’m gonna make a mess of it.”

“I’m not trying to look pretty, Catnip.”

Katniss had been all angles at twelve, bony knees and thin wrists. Gale was already muscular, her looks narrow and knowing. Katniss had closed her eyes for the first few snips, but then she got confident. When they were done, she brushed the hair from Gale’s shoulders and arms, already wiry at 12. Her sun-dark skin was warm to the touch.

Gale let out the breath she’d been holding. “How do I look?”

“Good,” Katniss said. “Pretty handsome, I guess.”

“Handsome?”

Katniss had known she was flushing red. “Just teasing.” “

No, I like it.” Gale had glanced at every puddle on the way home, grinned at her reflection, acted sheepish when she realized Katniss had noticed. From then on, it was Katniss and Katniss only who cut Gale’s hair. It was Katniss and Katniss only who was allowed near Gale with sharp things.

 

 

 

 

There are times in the woods they don’t speak of, not ever. Gale falls from a tree, gouges her leg on the ground. Katniss binds the torn skin it in her ripped sleeve, lowers her mouth to the bared flesh of Gale’s calf. Presses her lips there for a moment, and then feels her heart skipping in her throat, her chin cupped by Gale’s bloody fingers.

Katniss’ back on the cold sand of the creek, Gale kneeling over her. The look between them before Gale exhales, before her hand is between Katniss’ thighs.

“I don’t want to hear your name tomorrow.”

“Not yours, either.”

The sky is cornflower blue, even with the stars. A fire crackles behind them.

When Katniss leans into Gale, her head fits perfectly beneath Gale’s chin.

“Better it’s us than someone else,” Gale says, and then nothing else.

 

 

 

 

 

II.

 

 

 

 

 

They call the name of Peeta Mellark. A slight figure mounts the stage, hands balled into fists at her side.

The first thing Katniss takes in is the girl’s build, imagines how she would fare in the arena. This girl is short and pretty, her bared arms soft and white as valley lilies. Someone has braided ribbons into her gold-brown locks, white and green and blue, a sister or a mother. When she looks into the crowd, her pale eyes shine like a rabbit in a trap.

Katniss knows the girl without wanting to know her. She sees her blue linen dress, her clean hair, and she can already count on one hand the hours the girl will survive in the arena. She’ll die quickly, uselessly, unless a Career Amazon decides to be cruel and draw it out, torture her with knives or fire or worse. Peeta is easy prey. Peeta will be snuffed like a flame in the hand, a little show for some Amazon to get a sponsor’s attention.

Katniss looks at Gale, teeth making her bottom lip white. Gale is looking at this girl on the stage, and Katniss is sure she’s thinking the same thing.

And then, of course, Prim’s name is called, and the rest is history.

 

 

 

 

Haymitch is scarred and formidable, her grey hair an uneven mess cropped tight to her head. While the alcoholism has dried her out -- and there’s probably something ironic there, if Katniss was the type to think on that -- you can still see the hard shape of her shoulders, the thickness to her legs and arms. She’s late to breakfast and she smells like a bad night.

Effie Trinket only sniffs when Haymitch puts her boots up on the table, continues to smile at the girls.

Haymitch takes one look at Peeta and laughs. Peeta silently tucks into her food without meeting anyone’s eye.

“You might make it a while,” Haymitch says to Katniss, and her voice is rough as her crooked mouth, rock grating on rock. “You got that look about you.”

Katniss narrows her eyes at this, sets her jaw. She doesn’t need an old drunk telling her about inevitability, not today, not ever. “What look?”

There’s something like a smile on Haymitch’s face, if you can call it a smile at all. “That one.”

 

 

 

 

Katniss dreams of Gale, holding a screaming Prim.

“It’s okay,” Gale is saying, kneeling at Katniss’ feet, holding her waist in her strong hands. Gale is pressing her head between Katniss’ legs, and Katniss has her fingers tangled in Gale’s hair, can feel the tight muscles in Gale’s neck, the hard line of her jaw. “I’ve got you, Catnip.”

The train rattles beneath her, except that’s not right. The train barely makes any noise. Its silence is nightmarish to Katniss, constantly unnerving.

She wakes up with a hand to her chest, can almost feel her ribcage shaking from the thunder of her heart.

 

 

 

 

“What, so you can bake?” Haymitch rolls her eyes. “And sew and cook and clean, too, I bet. Those will be a lot of help in the arena.”

Peeta’s face goes stony in response. Katniss pretends she can’t hear from the other side of the room, pretends Haymitch’s breath doesn’t smell like alcohol and Peeta doesn’t look mad for the first time since Katniss met her.

“You wanna be weak, that’s fine,” Haymitch says. “Your blood isn’t gonna be on my hands.”

“Those things aren’t weak.” Peeta gets to her feet, faces down Haymitch. “Liking those things isn’t weak, and being good at those things isn’t weak. Being good at feminine things won’t get me killed in the arena. You not training me properly will, though.”

 

 

 

 

In the Capitol, they cut Peeta’s hair. The stylists give her something different and new, as they keep putting it, an asymmetrical bob that reveals Peeta’s delicate ears and long neck. Katniss can’t stop looking at her, and Peeta notices, meets Katniss’ eye for the first time since they boarded the train.

“How do I look?”

“Good,” Katniss says, biting into a bright green apple. The ripeness of the fruit makes her think of the blackberries she used to pick in the meadow, the dark stains in the corners of Gale’s mouth.

“You look absolutely stunning,” Effie says, smiling that eerie smile of hers. “The pinnacle of style, of course. I’m sure every girl in Panem is going to want the same cut.”

“My mother never let me cut it.” Peeta blushes. “She’ll have a fit when she sees me on the screens.”

“Your hair should be the least of her worries,” Katniss says, and then wishes she hadn’t.

Peeta returns to her room, leaves her meal unfinished. Effie twitters on for a while more about hair and style and keeping things bright and busy. Haymitch is drinking in the corner of the room, fixing Katniss with a stare.

 

 

 

 

Peeta is stupidly beautiful sometimes, but it’s not in the way the Capitol likes, not flashy and bright and easy to see. Peeta’s hair is the same color as the dim gold light before the sunset. The stylists keep telling her that she should dye it, that she needs something about her to be memorable. Katniss watches all this over her shoulder while Cinna reminds her to smile, to hold herself a little taller.

Later, they are eating dinner together, a reluctant team, and Peeta brings it up.

“Apparently I’m not memorable,” she says.

“Of course you are,” Effie nearly shouts, seems to stumble over her response for a moment. “Your hair is very nice, Peeta. I think your hair is very memorable.”

“I’d remember you,” Katniss says.

Peeta looks up. Their knees bump under the table.

“Will you remember me when I die in the arena?”

Effie nearly chokes on her food. “I think now is hardly the time to talk about such--”

“You won’t die,” Katniss says, pushes her knee directly into Peeta’s. “I promise that you won’t.”

Effie changes the subject.

They don’t talk about it again.

 

 

 

 

Katniss still dreams about Gale. Prim, too, and the meadow and the woods, the field where they’d cut Gale’s hair.

She dreams about the trees, their canopies swaddled in fire. She dreams about Gale’s bare skin, blood and bone and teeth.

“They gave me a pill for nightmares,” Peeta confides once. “Because I was crying in my sleep so much, they said.”

“They watch us sleep?”

“They watch us do everything.” And Peeta had leaned into Katniss then, their shoulders pressed together. Katniss was surprised by how warm Peeta was, as if she’d been sitting in the sun. But that was impossible in the training gym, where the artificial lights made everything too hot or too cold, whichever was the least comfortable. Near to Peeta, for the first time since they’d left District 12, Katniss felt her limbs sigh with comfort.

 

 

 

 

Everyone tells Katniss that everyone loves Katniss. She doesn’t know what to make of that.

The Capitol loves the deadly ones and the beautiful ones, the ones who don’t cry and the ones who cry too much. Peeta is none of these things, at least according to the Capitol. Katniss does not mind that Peeta is none of these things, because Peeta is so many other things.

Haymitch drinks less now.

Haymitch tells them where to run, how to sleep, when to hide. Her sessions go on for too long, and yet never long enough.

“Keep each other alive,” Haymitch says, over and over, sometimes drunk, sometimes sober. Katniss can hear it in her sleep, recites it to herself when she is beside Peeta at breakfast, when they are lined up in the gym.

And then to Katniss, when the two of them are alone, when Peeta has gone to train and Haymitch has told Katniss that there is no more training to be done:

“You should be the one to do it.”

“I don’t-”

“You know, Katniss.”

and Katniss does know, has thought about it before. Peeta is a town girl, has grown up with new shoes one Sunday a month, fresh fruit in the morning. Boys might have called after her and she was allowed to say no, had a mother who would have taught her that prudence and piety were her chief virtues. No one would have questioned that she was pretty. No one would have questioned that a pretty girl with golden hair was worthy of safety and happiness.

Peeta has skin the color of milk. Her palms are soft and her kneecaps are soft and Katniss knows that if you were to run your finger along the inside of Peeta’s arm, it’d be soft and smooth. Peeta is not like Katniss or Gale. Peeta’s family hasn’t told stories that go back generations, stories that have mountains of blue smoke, tear-trails, languages stolen and buried at iron-barred schools.

Peeta’s family isn’t frowned upon for the shade of their skin. Peeta’s hair is light and thin, her eyes the same color as the sky. Katniss stares at the back of Peeta’s head sometimes, thinks of how her own mother used to wrestle Katniss’ thick black hair into a braid, complain of its coarseness as if her own hair wasn’t just as thick and dark. Gale still speaks of a grandmother who knew the old languages, languages of dark times and forced journeys. Peeta has known nothing of this life.

All of this is to say that yes, Katniss knows what must be done, because Peeta is a town girl who hasn’t been called a dirty redskin, who hasn’t had her face ground into the mud while a town boy with straw-colored hair sits on her shoulders, telling her she deserves it. Katniss’ legs are strong from all the angry men and glaring mothers she’s run away from in her life. Katniss’ hands are calloused from the trees she’s climbed, knowing they are the only height she’s expected to reach. Katniss was never told her life was worth savoring, which is why she’s damned ready to fight for it.

Peeta will die in the arena. It is a truth silently acknowledged at their shared meals, a fact writ in neon numbers in the training halls. Haymitch is looking at Katniss, waiting for her understanding.

“I’ll do it,” Katniss says, a fact now, and nods. Mercy doesn’t mean life. Sometimes mercy means a better, sweeter death.

 

 

 

 

So when Katniss looks at Peeta on the eve of the Games, sees her standing in the door to Katniss’ suite, mercy is on her mind.

“I’m not ready,” Peeta says, and there’s sweat on her brow and she’s still in her training gear, fresh from the gym. Peeta is there more than Katniss, working her body endlessly, and it shows in the way her small frame has been newly reshaped with muscle, her softness harder to read except in her face.

“I don’t think we’ll ever be ready. I don’t think that’s the point.”

Katniss considers getting out of bed, or making room beside her, or doing something. Instead her head stays on the pillow, and she stares at Peeta, breathing hard in the doorway. Peeta takes one step forward and the glass slides automatically behind her, locks clicking from some unseen technology they’ll never know in their district.

“I’m sick of being afraid,” Peeta says, and there is a moment when Katniss contemplates kissing her, but she doesn’t.

 

 

 

 

The next time she sees Peeta is in the arena. Her hair is bright gold in the sun.

 

 

 

 

In a way, it’s not important to talk about what happens in the arena. What happens is what always happens: death, carnage, girls learning or failing to learn the ways limbs can be torn from bodies. Carefully, or with no care at all.

Career Amazons make shows of their kills, draw out the torture until some aroused sponsor sends them a gift. Katniss waits for Peeta’s name to appear in the sky, or for her voice to be the one crying out over someone else’s laughter.

Katniss knows that there is some sadness in the story of the Amazons, little girls taken from their families and taught to maim, to kill. An honor in their districts, this removal of their humanity. And there are rumors of the sponsors to whom they must pledge service, the nights they left their suites and had to visit sponsors in villas and apartments, the unspoken looks between them the next day at training. _T_

_he Games are killing all of us._

One of the Amazons has a scar on her neck in the shape of a crescent moon. Katniss saw it during training, and she’s seen it once since, climbing over a mine before disappearing into the brush. Katniss should have taken the shot, but she didn’t. She was looking at the scar and thinking of how the moon in the arena isn’t even real. She was thinking of the moon in District 12, the yellow ring that sometimes appeared around it. A lucky moon, Gale used to say, and Katniss had lowered her bow.

 

 

 

 

Rain-soaked, halfway up a tree, Katniss will remember a story her mother used to tell them when the candles wouldn’t light. The sky of the arena is the same color of the snow before it retreats in March, grey and uneven, and the clouds that are being generated somewhere keep racing too fast, changing the shadows on her shoulders.

“Death met Rabbit by the river one day. Death had a limp, so Rabbit knew he could outrun him. But if Rabbit stopped running, Death would catch up. Death told Rabbit he wouldn’t give up, so if Rabbit wanted to stay alive, he’d have to keep running. Rabbit had to take the hardest roads he knew. He swam across lakes and jumped over rocks. He ran right up the sharpest parts of the mountain, hoping Death would get tired. He knew taking the hardest way was the only way to keep Death off his back. And after a while, he turned around and Death apologized for it not being fair. Rabbit tripped and Death gobbled him up.”

Gale is somewhere out there, she keeps thinking. Thousands of miles from these woods is another woods and Gale is there, Gale is checking traps and walking up the ridge. Gale is breathing in the smell of the leaves and the wet ground.

Someone is screaming in the distance, the desperate sound of an animal cornered. Katniss closes her eyes, waits for it to end, for the cannon to sound. Gale is picking a dogwood flower. Gale is thinking of her. Gale is smiling.

 

 

 

 

In the arena, Katniss dreams of a great fire, of lightning striking the earth amid flames. She dreams of the vast greenness that springs from the ash, the way the woods and the valleys reclaim themselves.

And then one day, she opens her eyes and Peeta is standing at the bottom of the tree, staring up at her. There is blood on her face and blood in her hair, and when Katniss looks down at her, she nods.

 

 

 

 

“Do you know what I wish for more than anything?”

Katniss’ back is pressed against Peeta’s. She is so much smaller than Gale that Katniss cannot help but feel the difference, the familiar position made so strange and new.

“A quilt,” Peeta says. Katniss can hear the smile in her voice, the ache. “A nice warm quilt. I’d wrap myself up and I’d never come out.”

Katniss thinks of another conversation she’s had, Gale coming up with all the ways they could escape. And Peeta wants to escape, too, or retreat. Whichever option comes first.

Katniss had never considered these options. _The hard way is the only way to outrun death,_ and then she tries not to think about it anymore.

“You sleep first,” Katniss says. “I’ll keep watch.”

 

 

 

 

Later, there are the fights and the cave and the other things. Bloody things. Dark things.

When Katniss kisses Peeta, she realizes she is trying to outrun something, too.

Peeta’s mouth is a flood and Katniss is hoping she’ll drown, ready to be lost.

 

 

 

 

 

III.

 

 

 

 

Gale’s skin is cold when Katniss touches it. For a moment she remembers the bodies of the dead in the arena, but she closes her eyes, presses her forehead into Gale’s chest.

“Is this real?” she whispers, and she can feel Gale hesitate before wrapping her arms around Katniss’ shoulders, pulling her closer.

“It’s real,” Gale says.

“You promise?”

She sounds like a child and she knows it. If she was going to be vulnerable for anyone, though, it would be here, with her, with her Gale.

“I promise, Catnip.”

 

 

 

 

The new house is too big to keep clean. Prim shoots up a few inches and their mother wraps her braids around her head, a black crown. She doesn’t ask Katniss about the arena, about the death or the waiting or Peeta, especially Peeta, and Katniss doesn’t mind.

When she sees Peeta, she is growing her hair out again. Peeta’s mother won’t look at Katniss. Peeta will smile for too long, like she’s expecting something to happen. Katniss knows Peeta well enough to know that such smiles are bursts in the dam.

 

 

 

 

“I didn’t want this. Any of it.”

Haymitch snorts, an ugly sound. “Too damn bad, honey. What’s done is done. Congratulations, you won, and it’s the worst goddamned thing in the world. I can promise you that.”

It’s her first taste of shine. Haymitch eyes her while she drinks, won’t let her leave the house until she’s sat down for a long while. Katniss already knows she won’t make a habit out of it. She doesn’t allow herself any habits, whether comfort or punishment, not anymore.

 

 

 

 

Gale is telling her about the mine, about the starvation and the beatings. Katniss is watching Gale’s mouth, the line of soot along her jaw that she wasn’t able to wash in the ice-logged stream.

“I’m not mad,” Gale says once, and Katniss knows it’s about what she saw on the screens of the last days in the arena. “I understand.”

She doesn’t. “I know you do.”

When they kiss, they kiss like they are tired and hungry from battle. Like there is blood in the corner of their mouths.

Katniss knows she loves Gale because every look from her is the simultaneous ache of a root burying itself deeper, a stone being unearthed and laid out in the sun.

 

 

 

 

“I don’t think I’m as strong as I used to be.”

Gale laughs, looks her up and down. “Catnip, you’re stronger than I am now. I bet you could lift me up with one hand.”

“Not that kind of strength.”

They are walking back to Gale’s house, their breaths at their shoulders like a fog. Gale is wearing the scarf Prim made for her years ago. Katniss wants to touch it and the skin beneath it. She wishes there was nothing else to do, nothing else that could be asked of her but to touch Gale’s scarf.

“I want to give up sometimes,” she says, and Gale stops walking. “I know I can’t, but it doesn’t stop me from thinking about it. There’s so many times when I tell myself it’d be easier to just let go.”

Gale has taken her hand. The way she looks at Katniss makes her heart feel too big. “I’m not going to lose you again, Catnip. Not in this lifetime, not ever. If I have to fight in every Games there is, I goddamned will, as long as it keeps you safe.”

Katniss believes her.

 

 

 

 

It’s different now. Girls will always look at her in the street, give her the strangest smiles, so small and so unafraid. Mothers nod, sometimes catching her hand in passing. Thank you, they’ll whisper, pressing things into her palm, flowers or ribbons or buttons with a face scratched into the other side. It’s not until she holds it up to the light later that she sees it is the face of the statue in the square. It’s the face of Eve.

A little girl gives Peeta a flower crown on the day they leave for the tour. Peeta laughs, kisses the girl’s cheeks. She asks the little girl if she made a crown for Katniss, too. The girl shakes her head shyly, takes Peeta’s hand to lead her to the train. Their palms are pale pink against pale pink.

Gale kisses her goodbye. It’s strange, the publicness of the gesture, even if they’re standing in an alley and Gale’s hands are on her cheeks as if they need to hide their faces.

“It’s not over,” Gale says quietly. “We’re not over, Catnip.”

 

 

 

 

The rest, of course, is history.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
